random notes

TR Sullivan 1887 stage play of Jekyll/Hyde

Jekyll and Hyde adapted, Brian A Rose

Jekyll and Hyde dramatized, Martin A. Danahay and Alexander Chrisholm

Special Effects in The Invisible Man

I decided to paraphrase this, but I might want to refer to the original source anyway:

John P. Fulton said in an interview with The American Cinematographer (September 1934),

“The wire technique could not be used, for the clothes would look empty, and would hardly move naturally. So we had to recourse to multiple printing-- with variations. Most of these scenes involved other, normal characters, so we photographed these scenes in the normal manner, but without any trace of the invisible man. All of the action, of course, had to be carefully timed, as in any sort of double-exposure work. This negative was then developed in the normal manner.

Then the special-process work began. We used a completely black set – walled and floored with black velvet, to be as nearly non-reflective as possible. Our actor was garbed from head to foot in black velvet tights, with black gloves, and a black headpiece rather like a driver’s helmet. Over this, he wore whatever clothes might be required. This gave us a picture of the unsupported clothes moving around on a dead black field. From this negative, we made a print, and a duplicate negative which we intensified to serve as mattes for printing. Then, with an ordinary printer, we proceeded to make our composite: First we printed from the positive of the background and the normal action, using the intensified, negative matte to mask off the area where our invisible man's clothing was to move. Then we printed again, using the positive matte to shield the already printed area, and printing in the moving clothes from our "trick" negative." This printing operation made our duplicate, composite negative to be used in printing the final master prints of the picture” (Weaver et al 82).

From Universal Horrors: the studio's classic films, 1931-1946. By Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas. McFarland, 2007.

NOTE to self

Do I want to come up with a special theoretical term like THE SCIENTIFIC SUPERNATURAL to signify what I mean by supernatural substantiated by the scientific or the scientific combined with the supernatural?  Is that to pretentious/presumptuous? Do I not get to do that?  Think more on this.

A source to check on later.

For introduction: Look up Walter E. Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind.

A source from 1917 I stumbled upon...

Thanks, Google Books.

The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
by Dorothy Scarborough

"No supernaturalism is incredible if it is expressed in technical terminology, and no miracle will be rejected if its setting be in a laboratory.  One peculiar thing about modern scientific thought in its reaction upon fiction is that it is equally effective in realism, such as shown in teh naturalisti novels of Zola, the plays of Brieux and others, and in supernaturalism, as in the work of H.G. Wells, for instance, where the ghostly is grafted on to cold realism" (Scarborough 252). 

She lists a bunch more texts that use the Fourth Dimension, if I need to add to that section of Chapter 2. 

She calls Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde "chemical supernaturalism" (Scarborough 268).  She refers to what he drinks as "the magic drug." 

""The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells, shows an unusual application of chemistry to ghostly fiction that gives a peculiar effect of reality because its style is that of scientific realism.  By experimentation with drugs a man finds a combination that will render living tissue absolutely invisible...This modern method of transferring to science the idea of invisibilty so prominent in connection with ghosts, showing the invisibility as the result of a chemical compound, not of supernatural intervention, affecting a living man not a spirit, makes the effect of supernaturalism more vivid even than in the case of ghosts" (Scarborough 269).

"This type shows a strange effect of realism in supernaturalism, because of the scientific methods, for supernaturalism imposed on material things produces an effect of verisimilitude not gained int eh realm of pure spirit.  Too intellectually cold for the purposes of poetry, too abstract and elusive for presentation in drama, and too removed by its association with the fantastic aspects of investigation and the curiosities of science to be very appropriate tragedy, which has hitherto been the chief medium of expressing the dramatic supernatural, science finds its fitting expression in prose fiction" (Scarborough 280). 

General update.

I'm nearly finished with a draft of Chapter 2 (the H.G. Wells chapter).  I skipped Chapter 1 for now because I haven't read Two on a Tower yet.  Once the draft is finished (and by finished I mean in complete sentences...completely), I'll post it here.

Onward!

A quote for the introduction

From In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age
Peter Allan Dale
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

"Science....leads to the imaginary": Vaihinger's point (from The Philosophy of "As If," 1911) nicely summarizes some 75 years of intesne speculation on the method and meaning of science.  The point, as Vaihinger argues it, is safely epistemological.  Nineteenth-century scientific philosophers, although they might have begun by setting themselves the task of overthrowing the unreal, the imaginary constructions of metaphysics, repeatedly came back, in one way and another, to the realization that the initial move in the development of any scientific knowledge, whether of the natural or the human world, must be some sort of imaginary projection" (280). 

"Wells and the Novel"

by J. R. Hammond
from H.G. Wells Under Revision.  Edited by Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe.  London: Associated University Presses, 1990.

While discussing Wells' status as a novelist, J.R. Hammond touches briefly on the fact that Wells might make moves in his fiction that engage what he calls "the nineteenth-century realist tradition."  While he does not mention The Time Machine or The Invisible Man in this particular section, he does describe such a move as making the reader "continually aware of a blurring of the distinction between the fiction one is reading and the world beyond the text" (Hammond 76).

He goes on to cite a passage from an early "realistic" novel by Wells called The Wheels of Chance, but the statement can apply to his more fantastic work, such as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man as well.  He says, "This reminder that what the reader has before him is a novel destroys the illusion of reality: an illusion that the author is at pains to erode at several points in the story" (Hammond 76).  There are similar reminders throughout The Time Machine, and, contrary to Hammond's claim, such reminders don't actually destroy the illusion of reality; they merely cause the reader to pause and question how reality might be represented in a novel.  How are representations determined to be real or unreal?  How do representations reflect or change the real?

This reference to novel writing or storytelling as fact or fiction within a novel is, course, not a new or innovative narrative technique by Wells.  In fact, it is one that has been in existence and actually, for many scholars, defines the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century.  The hyperbolic insistence on truth that actually emphasizes the fictionality of a novel such as Moll Flanders even more is one that is unique to the novel as a form or genre. 

Yesterday's reading.

Haynes, Roslynn D.  From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Haynes breaks down the latter half of the nineteenth century into three pieces - realist novels of the 50s and 60s, adventure novels of the 80s, and the fin de siecle novels of the 90s. Her argument basically identifies historical shifts in how scientists were represented on two poles, positive and negative.  In the romantic period they were romanticized, in the realist novels after that they were bleakly represented, in adventure novels after that they were idealistic heroes, and then towards the turn of the century they were scrutinized once again. H.G. Wells appears as a significant portion of this last chapter as an author who, along with Stevenson, portrays scientists as villains or morally compromised. 

Haynes chooses to give "the scientist as adventurer" a separate chapter from characters created by Wells and Stevenson.  The Time Traveller is certainly an adventurer, and despite having his hopes for humanity dashed upon seeing the future, he still starts out as an idealist.  

Haynes has a very reductive and anachronistic conception of realism, as she actually makes the argument that since so few authors practiced science, they could not identify with a scientist's "concerns, motivation, and language" (Haynes 108) and therefore could not realistically represent scientists in literature.  Haynes goes on to say that unfortunately "most novelists were quite ignorant of what scientists did or said when they were not present at social gatherings or giving public lectures" (Haynes 108).

Haynes does, however, compare realism to scientific materialism, albeit briefly.  The only definition of realism provided, however, is one sentence in a footnote, saying that "As Zola argued in his Roman Experimental (Paris 1880) realism is essentially concerned with the study of man's relation to the material world, that is, with his physical, social, and psychological interactions rather than with an idealist, transcendental or allegorical picture" (Haynes 341).

Other important factoids that can go into my introduction of the scientist figure:
-Within the scientific community, biology and astronomy became favored over chemistry and physics.  So even though the scientist as a learned profession would have come into its own and gained legitimacy by the 1890s (a legitimacy it did not enjoy a few decades before), the scientist figures studied here still might be seen as radical or on the fringes of the field, with Griffin being a chemist and the Time Traveller being a physicist.  
- The term scientist was first coined by William Whewell in a review he wrote for the Quarterly Review in 1834, but the budding profession, despite becoming more legitimate halfway through the century, would continue to be considered derogatory or ill-favored (much like the contemporary use of dentists as inferior to medical doctors) because practicing science for money was considered tacky or of lower class. 
-Science was not recognized by institutions, governmental or educational, but rather developed as a popular form, via scientific societies and public lectures sponsored by them. 

The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells

by Frank McConnell
New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

"His "realistic" novels of this period, in other words, should be read along with his more explicitly scientific romances, since they explore many of the same themes with only a slight change of tone" (McConnell 35).

Two things learned from a mediocre HG Wells biography.

From H.G. Wells by Brian Murray
New York: Continuum, 1990.

1.) I actually found the letter Joseph Conrad wrote in which he calls Wells the "realist of the fantastic" (other sources had previously only mentioned the letter).  Conrad, in response to reading The War of the Worlds, writes,
"I suppose you'll have the common decency to believe me when I tell you I am always powerfully impressed by your work.  Impressed is THE word, O Realist of the Fantastic! whether you like it or not.  And if you want to know what impresses me it is to see how you contrive to give over humanity to the clutches of the Impossible and yet manage to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, to its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly.  THAT is the achievement.  In this little book you do it with an appalling completeness." (Murray 39)

Murray cites this as being from Parrinder's H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, p. 60.

2.) Critics of The Time Machine criticized the novel for its holes in logic.  Mostly trying to disprove time travel as a possibility, as if Wells were presenting a real scientific theory rather than offering a mere fictional adventure.

"The book impressed several reviewers with the power of its descriptions and the vitality of its prose; but one, Israel Zangwill, himself a novelist, pointed out that the tale does present lapses in logic that some readers have always found hard to ignore.  As Zangwill observes, it never occurs to Wells's "Time Traveller" that he will have to repeat "these painful experiences of his, else his vision of the future will have falsified itself - though how the long dispersed dust is to be vivified again does not appear."  Moreover, writes Zangwill, had the Time Traveller "travelled backwards, he would have reproduced a Past which, insofar as his own appearance in it with his newly invented machine was concerned, would have been ex hypothesi unveracious."  For of course had he "recurred to his own earlier life, he would have had to exist in two forms simultaneously, of varying ages."  These "absurdities," writes Zangwill, "illustrate the absurdity of any attempt to grapple with the notion of Time"' they prove too that "there is no getting into the Future, except by waiting." (Murray 37)

A Trip to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon

This film is considered one of the first science fiction films ever made.  It also showcases how film technology being born at the turn of the century made it so that the fantastic could be presented as realist.

A word on Victorian scientists for the introduction.

The scientist figure is the perfect vehicle for this kind of realist experiment.  As Jack Meadows claims in The Victorian Scientist, "History textbooks will tell you that the origins of modern science are to be found in the seventeenth century.  In terms of the basic ideas, this is quite true.  But, for the building of the modern scientific community, the nineteenth century is the key period.  ...that was when scientists became professionals with a significant role in society" (Meadows 1).  Scientists occupied a new and not entirely accepted profession.  Meadows goes on in his first chapter to trace the early educational lives of many of the century's most notable scientists, and shows how many of them were practicing science as hobbies because the classical education in the liberal arts was more valued than chemistry, for example, which was often called "useless" by public school teachers.

Some statements about realism for my introduction

In many works specifically tackling realism, it may be difficult to actually maintain a grasp on the term itself.  Some critics might off-handedly refer to realism and assume a reader's working knowledge of it that exactly coincides with his or hers [examples??].  A reader's confusion of criticism derives mostly from the fact that there are, in the history of literary criticisms and critics, competing definitions of realism.  Harry E. Shaw in Narrating Reality: Scott, Austen, and Eliot, does a particularly good job of exploring what realism meant to a handful of major critics, from canonized relics such as Barthes and Lukacs to contemporary critics such as Colin MacCabe and Lennard Davis.  Levine, upon whom I rely heavily, also gets a brief mention in realism's critical history, but only to the point of being named as against the naivete traditionally associated with realism.  At the end of his introduction, he says, "My categorization of these critiques of realism suggests a fundamental question: How could any mode of representation attract such utterly divergent views, not simply about its merits, but about its fundamental character?" (Shaw 30). 

Another important point Shaw takes the time to make is that throughout the history of realism's criticism, VALUE has continually associated with its definition.  Shaw's intent in arguing this may be to take himself out of the very debate about which he writes, but that seems impossible.  A defense of realism still permeates his writing, very much in the way I have tried to defend popular fiction here.  break the cycle!

This project does not wish to establish "the" definition of realism, to argue for one version over another, but rather to explore

Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot

By Harry E. Shaw
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

"In the last twenty years or so, anything approaching dialogue has been largely absent in discussions of realism.  Despite some promising recent developments, the realist novel has taken a beating.  David Lodge captures the central impetus of this attack on realism when he suggests that "Post-structuralist criticism, especially that which derives from teh work of Roland Barthes, has identified the 'classic realist text' as an instrument of ideology, a genre founded on bad faith, on the pretense that bourgeois culture is 'natural,' using the dominance of the authorial voice over all the other discourses in the text to limit meaning in the interests of control, repression, and privilege."  Lodge himself takes a more generous view.  Yet he inadvertently reveals how deeply what has become of the standard critique of realism has taken root when, a few sentences later, he suggests that "part of the problem is that realism is a literary effect that works by disguising its own conventionality"  (Shaw 8).  [He goes on to say that you can't assume that just because a novel isn't being meta-fictional that it is trying to disguise its conventionality or something else.]

Interesting....Shaw gets as defensive about realism and the realist novel as I and other critics do about popular fiction not considered realist.  He makes a point to argue that in high culture realism gets a bad rap; writers don't want their work to be considered realist.  This might be something to acknowledge in my writing.  I should say that instead of defending one or the other, because clearly that isn't even concrete (who the underdog in literary criticism is ambiguous or debatable), why not throw out the binary all together? 

"What has become the standard case against realism rests on objections that may be grouped under two heads.  Realist representation is said to be naively transparent and malignantly totalistic.  On the one hand, realism supposedly promises its reader a "direct' mirroring of reality, one that provides "literal transcriptions of reality, forms in which, as it were, reality writes itself."  On the other hand, realism supposedly attempts to make the world of the bourgeoisie seem "natural" and "full," thereby giving its vision of reality a peremptory power over our imaginations" (Shaw 9).  [the quote here is footnoted as Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979, 24). 

HG Wells: Modernity and the Movies

Keith Williams.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.

Technology (esp. film) was treated by Victorians with the same supernatural awe as Sherlock Holmes' powers of deduction...."visual conjuring."  "By the autumn of 1896 stage magician Georges Melies was experimenting with deliberate visual conjuring made possible by editing and 'stop motion effects'"(Williams 4).

Williams uses the term "realist of the fantastic" to describe Wells.  He attributes this term to a letter Joseph Conrad wrote in 1898.

The dissolve = being in two places at one time.

The time traveller's invention resembles visual gadgets of the time, like the kintetoscope.  "It's posssible, as Terry Ramsaye argued in 1926, that Wells's machine is more like Edison's kinetoscope: its motion is controlled by a lever not unlike the kinetoscope's crank and it gives a 'private', individual view (although not a miniaturised one).  The kinteoscope also afforded the entertainment novelty of seeing ordinary actions temporally speeded up or reversed" (Williams 27-28).

The Time Machine questions human perception of time and The Invisible Man questions human perception of space!  (Film questions both of these things....inspiration?)

Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of th Fallacies of Perception (London: Walter Scott, 1897).  *****CHECK THIS OUT

"Even more so than the simulacral moving picture, the perfection of the synchronised soundtrack was promoted as a guarantee of the medium's faithful mimiesis of a bodily reality, an extension of the tendency to offer representations as unmediated perceptions, as Armstrong documents.  It was argued that whereas film-images can never be anything more than illusions of movement in three-dimensional space, projected from static frames on a two=dimensional surface, recorded sound when played back was an actual vibration of air layers authentically apprehended by the ear..."(Williams 57).

"Suffice it to say that, in the 1890s, the striking convergences between Wells's scientific romances and stories and the new visual technology established a slender but vital critical synergy between literature and the upstart, popular medium, which much two-way traffic has re-energised ever since" (Williams 48).

"Thus Wells' initial coup as COnrad's 'realist of the fantastic' explicitly focuses on the very boundary between virtualism and reality, just as that ambiguity would come to characterise the visual culture of modernity exemplified by cinema.  Similarly, like the medium as it evolved, Wells's machine is, as Bignell puts it, 'a curious mixture of scientific experiment and fairground thrills.'  The Time Traveller describes the invention's motion as a kind of 'switchback' (TM 19).  (Pioneer director D.W. Griffith would use exactly the same metaphor for the interruption of temporal continuity in cinematic narrative by the past.)  Thus the connection between Wells and Paul is a perfect illustration of Jean-Louis Baudry's argument that cinema grew out of a cultural desire 'to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions'."  (Williams 30).

After pointing out that the Time Traveller is accused by the Meidcal Man of being a conjurer ("like the ghost you showed us last Christmas?), Williams says "Film was the modern medium in which the conjuror's art became consummately invisible and it was no wonder that magic shops became frequent subjects of early British stop-motion animation.  Nevertheless, as Wells acknowledged, it rendered the most fantastic impossibilities paradoxically 'hyperreal'"(Williams 45).  (He's talking about this in the context of Wells' short story, "The Magic Shop" 1903.)

absent presences

Another, separate thought on The Time Machine.

There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in the Time Traveller's role as scientist.  He, on the one hand, completely relies on scientific experimentation, is obsessed with it to the point of unreal innovation.  But then, at the very end of the novel, the narrator describes him as against scientific innovation.  He says, "He, I know -- for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made -- thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end."  One might assume that his experiences with the Eloi and the Murlochs have influenced him, making him realize that scientific progress isn't always positive, but the narrator makes a point to say that the Time Traveller felt this way "long before the Time Machine was made," meaning that he has always felt this way towards the "Advancement of Mankind" that his scientific experiments contribute to.  Why would he feel this way?  Is this yet another coexistence of seemingly antithetical discourses?  Or might he have been unaware of the irony in his sentiment toward the "Advancement of Mankind," considering his participation in it? 

Or, perhaps this explains why the Time Traveller never cares to publicize his findings.  He shares his journey with his friends, but when they fail to believe him, he isn't too bothered by it and keeps the Time Machine to himself thereafter.  This point of possible contradiction speaks to larger issues surrounding Wells' purporting of the Eloi and Murlochs as, in its projection of the future, its own scientific theory not unlike those of Darwin. 

More free writing for Chapter 2 (HG Wells)

While reading Thomsa C. Renzi's H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film, I remembered that a large part of what I want to talk about with The Time Machine is the narrative structure and self-reflexive references to narrative itself.

Possible Chapter Outline:
-Time Machine's historical context (theories of the fourth dimension at the time)
-close reading of fourth dimension as a demonstration of limited human perception --connect to realism
-apply the same thing to The Invisible Man
-talk about the narrative structure of each novel and how it relates to realism - narrative time travel or narrative as time traveling!
-talk about film adaptations? (this will more likely be spread throughout the chapter)


TEXT TO GO DIRECTLY INTO CHAPTER:
When comparing the 1960 film adaptation to Wells' text, Renzi points out that while Wells employs a "frame narrator" director George Pal chooses to represent the narrative frame with a character, David Filby.  He says, "The Frame Narrator and Frame Character serve at least two purposes.  Their outside viewpoint carries a degree of objectivity and gives credibility to the inventor's Inset Narrative.  Second, they ground the story in a reality with which the audience can identify before and after experiencing the wondrous trip in the Time Machine" (Renzi 19).  Renzi ascribes this similarity in narrative frame between film and novel to the fact that both narratives need to contain the fantastical portion of the narrative - time travel.  The idea of a narrative frame "grounding the story in reality" implies that the the story itself is unreal, assuming an antithetical relationship between the two narrative discourses.  I would argue that one could also see the narrative frame as a mechanism for naturalizing time travel.  If the reader or spectator is already "grounded in reality" as Renzi says, then that sets up the time travel in the narrative as a logical part of that reality. 

Renzi also goes on to say that the return to reality provided by the narrative frame renders the realism of the time travel moot because, "the value of the dream experience is not whether it was real, but that it left an indelible impression."  This, I think, shortchanges the intellectual significance of the narrative frame and overlooks the time machine as a product of scientific experimentation.  In some ways it actually agrees with the aforementioned argument that the narrative frame naturalizes or real-izes the time travel narrative embedded within in that the reader, according to Renzi, doesn't seem to pay much attention to real and unreal on account of the narrative frame, but I would actually argue that Wells, in creating this narrative frame, hopes for readers to focus their attention on issues of realism, just not in terms of the real/supernatural binary. 

Having one time line embedded into another links the actual scientific theory behind time travel and narrative as a representation of time and space.  We begin in the Time Traveller's parlor room, explaining the theory behind the time machine, but then, instead of chronologically following the Time Traveller on his journey, the narrative remains in the Time Traveller's home, with his friends and colleagues, in order to receive him and then hear about his journey to the time of the Eloi after the fact.

The actual narrative of the Time Traveller's journey, then, is, not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written only a few years later in 1898, painstakingly told in quotations by the Time Traveller and not by the third person narrator.  Of both novels one must ask why have a narrator at all if the majority of the story is going to be told as dialogue from another non-narrator character?  For Conrad's work, many critics have argued that it is to emphasize the fact that narratives are inherently unreliable, of history or histories as always subjective and subject to the narrator's ideological, social, and political moorings. 

[Probably should bring in some Bakhtin here - both heteroglossia from "Discourse in the Novel" and narrative time from Chronotope essay.]

Even the Time Traveller himself, when the narrative frame comes to a close, remains unsure, for a brief moment, as to whether or not his story is real or was merely a dream.  He explicitly tells his colleagues that he does not expect them to believe him -  "I know...that all this will be absolutely incredible to you.  To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures" (Wells).  One, instead of assuming that the Time Traveller's admission of uncertainty is a way of labeling the middle portion of the narrative as fantastical, might think of the attention drawn to uncertainty as a way of showing that there is no way to discern to what extent any narrative told by any narrator might correlate to "reality."  All narratives are always already both dreamlike and real at once.

"I shared a cab with the Editor.  He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion.  The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober." --> THIS IS VICTORIAN REALISM!  The telling may be "credible and sober," but that does not exclude "fantastic and incredible" content.

[ADD PARAGRAPHS FROM OLD PROSPECTUS DRAFT, PRE-SHORTENING]

Some freewriting, a part of chapter 2 (HG Wells).

In addition to the Time Traveller's theory of time as the fourth dimension, there is, of course, the much more well known or recognized portion of the novel - the dystopian prediction for the future of human civilization.  As a scientific theory of H.G. Wells himself, how does the representation of man's future as a place where cultural and industrial "progress," as the humans in the Time Traveler's time perceive it, is in fact self-destructive, also operate as a realist project or experiment?

Like Darwin's theory of natural selection, the dystopia depicted in The Time Machine is a functional scientific theory that similarly implies projections for the future.  As either an application of Darwin's theories (resembling the atavism that will be discussed in Chapter 3) -- if humans evolve to select for certain traits, they may in fact end up like Morlocks and the Eloi.  Then again, Wells' proposed future may be a refutation of Darwin's theories, because the traits that have been selected for are obviously the weakest or least desirable - for the Eloi it's an ineffective delicacy, and for the Morlock's it's a hyper-aggressive and "savage" industry.  Alexei and Cory Panshin, in "The Reinvention of the Future" write, "The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid.  The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor."  These two civilizations serve as a cautionary tale that co-opts an existing scientific theory like natural selection for the sake of thinking the unthinkable, the inconceivable.

The Time Traveller even mentions Darwin by name, when he says that those unfamiliar theories like those of "the younger Darwin" don't realize that the sun will get hotter over time, thus accounting for the hotter weather that the Eloi experience.  This passing reference to Darwin positions him as a scientist who would back up the Time Traveller in his assessment of the future, as his theory of evolution, extended and adapted for the Time Traveller's purposes, actually means that Darwin's theory would implicitly have to be in agreement with his. 

The Panshins go on to say that "It is the Time Traveller's final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of the human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality.  But he concedes that even his theory may be wrong.  The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything.  We do not know what happened.  We cannot know.  The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery."

[GO BACK AND FIND ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL TO COMPLEMENT PANSHINS]

How is this scientific theory that predicts human civilization's future a realist experiment?  Active speculation, according to Caroline Levine, was a key tenet of realism.  The only problem is there's no way to test the Time Traveller's  -- we only have his narrative, his eye-witness account, to rely upon.  Or rather, there would be no way to test Wells' speculation, but his staging of the Time Traveller's narrative is the next best thing.

In Pursuit of Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age

Peter Allan Dale
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

"Lewes' approach is different.  It is self-consciously Aristotelian, indeed, neoclassical in its focus on mimesis or representation rather than expression and effect.  What he wants, above all, to write about is the relation between artistic structures and the real structure of the world; what he wants, above all, to recommend is that that relation to be literal or transparent, not symbolic.  In this we may, in fact, find him even more of a positivist in criticism than Mill, who, after all, allowed poetry its symbolic existence, where one might, for a time, escape from the rigors fo scientific analysis.  Correlatively, Lewes is still more radically opposed to the romantic aesthetic than is Mill, whose concept of the poetic derives from Coleridge and Carlyle, even as it reduces the symbol's metaphysical referents to psychological ones."  (65-66)